Lives in Limbo

Illusions and delusions in Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

Philip Seymour Hoffman finds all the crazy music in Willy Loman’s disappointment, in “Death of a Salesman.”Credit Illustration by HelloVon

In the first beat of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (now in a luminous revival, directed by Mike Nichols, at the Ethel Barrymore), the salesman Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) trudges up the path to his Brooklyn house, sample cases in hand. He has returned home after falling asleep at the wheel of his car. Inside, he slouches in a kitchen chair, like a tire deflating. “Oh boy, oh boy,” he says, thrumming the table with his stubby fingers, dimly aware that something in him is going terribly wrong. He is losing his concentration, his sales mojo, his salary, his temper, and, given his unmooring visions, maybe even his mind. “I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts,” he confides to Linda, his long-suffering wife (the tender and compelling Linda Emond). Willy has arrived at a kind of bewildering tipping point. “They seem to laugh at me,” he tells Linda about the buyers, adding, “I don’t know the reason for it, but they just pass me by. I’m not noticed.” Willy has begun to feel posthumous, or, as he puts it later, “I still feel kind of temporary about myself.”

A blowhard of pluck and positivity (“Be liked and you will never want” is one of his mantras), Willy has always wanted to seize victory from the world and to claim the kingdom of self, to be a somebody—which is both the promise and the imperative of American individualism. In his grandiosity, he inflates the facts and figures of his hapless life; and he puffs the same optimistic smoke into his two adult sons, Biff (Andrew Garfield) and Happy (Finn Wittrock), who bear the scars of his delusional expectations. As a father, Willy basks in a nostalgic glow, remembering the boys’ idolatry of him. But those bright-eyed youngsters have turned into ordinary, confused adults, each in his own way an enemy of promise—a fact that alternately perplexes and enrages Willy, whose idealization of Biff puts a fire wall of fantasy between him and his furious disappointment. “You got a greatness in you, Biff . . . ; you got all kindsa greatness,” he insists, force-feeding hope to his reluctant son.

The revelation of this production—drawn out by Nichols’s seamless and limpid orchestration of Willy’s disconcerting flights of imagination (Miller’s original title for the play was “The Inside of His Head”)—is that Willy, for all his fervent dreams of the future and his fierce argument with the past, never, ever, occupies his present. Even as he fights, fumes, and flounders, he is sensationally absent from his life, a kind of living ghost. It is existence, not success, that eludes him. He inhabits a vast, restless, awful, and awesome isolation, which is both his folly and his tragedy.

Willy is defined by the spirit of competition and by its corollary, invidious comparison. Envy is the gasoline on which American capitalism runs; it also runs Willy, driving him crazy. His “powerful strivings,” as Miller calls them, are his way of battling a corrosive sense of inadequacy. When Willy’s neighbor Charley (Bill Camp) shows him some generosity—he offers Willy work after he is crushed by the loss of his sales job—Willy’s bumptious, confounding ingratitude underlines Charley’s surplus and his own pathetic emptiness. The best defense against toxic self-loathing is to become the object of envy, which is why the gospel of achievement is Willy’s fundamentalist faith. He lives by the metric of success, constantly measuring the imagined distance between himself and others. “You are going to be five times ahead of him,” he says to his boys about Bernard (Fran Kranz), Charley’s nerdy son, who gets good grades. “I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises,” he tells them when they are teen-agers. “Because the man who makes an appearance in the business world . . . is the man who gets ahead.” If Willy can never actually make a killing, he can live within the lingo and the fantasy of vindictive triumph. “Knocked ’em cold in Providence, slaughtered them in Boston,” he brags to his boys, who, as adults, are flummoxed by their inability to rise in the world. Biff’s problem with petty theft and Happy’s misogynistic penchant for ruining the virginal brides-to-be of the higher-ups in his company (“I just have an overdeveloped sense of competition or something,” he says) are testimony to their own envious desires. In their ruthless quest to rob others of their power, the boys act out the message they learned at their father’s knee.

Nichols’s satisfying production emphasizes this dynamic, giving his staging of the play a particularly shocking subliminal punch. And Hoffman, an eloquent package of virulence and vulnerability, finds all the crazy music in Willy’s disappointment. Gravity seems to hang on his lumpy body like a rumpled suit, tethering him to the shaky ground he stands on. Willy is “tired to the death”: his exhaustion is spiritual, not just physical—the result of a soul-sapping struggle to face down humiliation in a world that keeps telling him he’s a failure.

The night he kills himself, Willy walks outside to plant some seeds in his garden. He has reared his children—his own seed—in the contaminated soil of delusion. “Dad, you’re never going to see what I am, so what’s the use of arguing,” Biff says, in their final, blistering confrontation. He goes on, “Pop, I’m a dime a dozen and so are you!” “I am not a dime a dozen!” Willy roars back. “I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!” Willy has never actually known his boys—he knows only his dream of them. He has never reflected back a true picture of them; he has never let the truth be spoken. As a result, the family has lived a collective lie, which endures even after it is denounced. When Biff, crying and broken, begs his father, “Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?,” it’s a searing moment—and Garfield, as Biff, makes the heartbreak sing. But Willy, on seeing tears in his son’s eyes, announces, with astonishment and elation, “Isn’t that . . . isn’t that remarkable? Biff! He likes me!” At a stroke, he eliminates the negative: hate becomes love, and suicide becomes a father’s heroic sacrifice in order to jump-start Biff’s success with an insurance payout. “That boy . . . that boy is going to be . . . magnificent,” Willy says, “choking with his love.” The love is pure; it’s the fantasy that’s perverse. The greatest loss is the loss of an illusion; Willy goes to his grave with his mad, destructive dream intact.

Cast to a T, and beautiful in all its scenic dimensions (with Jo Mielziner’s original, 1949 set design), this staging of “Death of a Salesman” is the best I expect to see in my lifetime.

According to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams’s plays gave a new generation of playwrights, including Miller, “a license to speak at full throat.” Williams’s lyric voice, with all its daring, poetic flamboyance, is nowhere better on show than in his fantastical 1953 allegory “Camino Real,” a bold departure and a famous flop. “This one was meant most for the vulgarity of performance,” Williams wrote in his Afterword to the play, but I don’t think the vulgarity of what Calixto Bieito calls his “new version”—a sort of poetic splatter painting (co-adapted by Bieito and Marc Rosich, at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre)—was quite what he had in mind.

The Goodman marquee refers to the show as “Tennessee Williams’s ‘Camino Real.’ “ What is onstage, however, is a co-authorship that doesn’t remotely represent Williams’s vision or his dramatic voice. “What does it mean to me today? And what can I express of myself with this?” are the questions that Bieito, who is Spanish, is quoted as posing, when he was asked to do his first American-built production, three years ago. Watching this “Camino Real,” one imagines that Bieito fell asleep while researching Williams and dreamed a collage of the playwright’s lines—a sort of zany meta-poetry—in which snatches of “Camino”’s dialogue are fused with choice bits lifted from other poems, characters, songs, and memoirs. A prologue is spoken by the Dreamer (Michael Medeiros), an old, drunken, vomiting poet, who dies after ingesting a bottle cap—a character who doesn’t appear in Williams’s script, and who represents the exact opposite of the romantic spirit of the play. In this twenty-seven-line passage alone, there are references to Williams’s 1972 poem “Old Men Go Mad at Night” and to his plays “Summer and Smoke” (1948) and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947). Taken out of context and crunched together, these fragments lose their point and a lot of their beauty. The speech is referential without being relevant. It’s a bit like compacting a Mercedes into a block of steel and calling it a luxury car.

“Camino Real” is set in the imaginary main plaza of a port town, whose central fountain has dried up—“The spring of humanity has gone dry in this place,” Sancho Panza says. In an arid, threatening, bizarre landscape, where dreamers and troublemakers are killed and swept away by street cleaners, where the word hermano (“brother”) is forbidden, where the only birds are wild ones that have been captured and locked in cages, the denizens of the Camino Real—who are mostly legends of literature—shuttle in perpetual jeopardy between a ritzy hotel and a flophouse. They live under constant financial threat, literally and symbolically in fear of being “discredited.” From Kilroy to the trapped Romantics (Lord Byron, Proust’s Baron de Charlus, Don Quixote, Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier), the characters inhabit a freakish world, warped by desperation and pitched between desire and retreat.

Bieito, who is a marvellous stager, is not much of a thinker; his production is recklessly, exuberantly, even sometimes elegantly, wrongheaded. It’s goofing on a grand scale. Although he incorporates many of Williams’s charming musical suggestions—the Mexican songs and the singing are lovely—all Williams’s stage directions (and, therefore, all his intentions) have been cut. Gone, too, are the characters Sancho Panza and Don Quixote and the notion of a quest that they embodied; the play’s landscape, with its clearly defined division between rich and poor; and the narrative characterizations of the dramatis personae, who are so radically pruned of story as to have become notional figures evoking a generalized barbarity. The production is about design, not depth; composition, not contemplation. You can admire its look, but you can’t connect to its cropped characters.

Here, without a wall to write on, Kilroy loses his poignance; the whore Esmerelda’s prayer, which might be considered Williams’s mission statement and the finest of his monologues, is never spoken. “God bless all con men and hustlers and pitchmen who hawk their hearts on the street, all two-time losers who’re likely to lose once more,” that speech begins. It ends, “Let there be something to mean the word honor again!” The words would be as much of a red flag to the fundamentalists of our day as they were to the rabid conservatives of the fifties. In this production, however, as far as I could tell, the only political statement, besides the de-rigueur police brutality, is made by outfitting Lord Byron (Mark L. Montgomery), an icon of Romanticism, in a straitjacket made from an American flag—an image with as much iconoclastic clout as a popgun. Instead of registering political disenchantment, this production allows the Baron de Charlus (André De Shields) to swagger downstage, for reasons known only to himself, and sing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You.”

After the performance, I stayed in the theatre for a discussion session with about thirty bewildered audience members. A show of hands revealed that most of them had never read “Camino Real.” They thought they’d just seen Tennessee Williams’s play; they were surprised to learn otherwise. I applaud the Goodman’s ambition but not the mischief of this approach. The play begs for the rigor of interpretation, not the caprice of deconstruction. At the end of the lively talk-back session, the dramaturge leading it, Neena Arndt, said, “If Tennessee Williams were alive today, I’m sure he would love what we’re doing.” Now you know. ♦

John Lahr has been the senior drama critic for The New Yorker since October, 1992.